The National Gallery bought a student's work. It's a masterpiece.

Washington Post

31-07-2025

Great Works, In Focus
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#195 The National Gallery bought a student's work. It's a masterpiece.
Pierre Louis Alexandre, a dockworker who modeled at the art academy on the side, appeared in painting after painting. Karin Bergöö Larsson's portrait of him broke with all the rest.
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Column by Sebastian Smee
July 31, 2025 at 11:25 a.m. EDT
4 minutes ago
3 min
So many things make this painting — a recent acquisition by the National Gallery of Art — stand out from those around it, but why not start with the colors?
Appreciate the way in which the sitter's yellow sash zings against the fresh blue sky. His red and white striped shorts complete the arrangement of clean, bright primaries, while his black hair and brown skin, set against so large a swath of blue, deepen the color effect in ways Henri Matisse (with his instinctive understanding of black as a dynamic color) doubtless would have admired.
The artist, Karin Bergöö Larsson (1859-1928), was Swedish. She was a student at Stockholm's Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts when she painted Pierre Louis Alexandre, a dockworker who had become a fixture at the academy, earning extra money as a model when the harbor froze over.
Alexandre was born into slavery in Guyana in 1843 or 1844. Around the age of 20, he arrived in Sweden, most likely as a stowaway on an American ship. His long stint as an artist's model — he posed there for 25 years — produced many likenesses. Scholars think we may have more painted portrayals of Alexandre than of any other Black person before the 20th century.
Larsson's portrayal of him combines pose and vantage point in striking ways. Alexandre looms above us in ways we usually associate with heroic depictions of men of high social stature. But his pose is informal and relaxed, his jackknifed leg exerting symmetrical pressure on his casually interwoven fingers and hands.
His body is shown in profile, giving the image a linear, neoclassical crispness. But his head, with its powerful, pensive expression, is turned slightly toward us, even as it subtly recedes in relation to his muscular right arm, injecting something slightly tumultuous into an otherwise stable composition.
Even though Alexandre was not in the least Moorish, other extant depictions of him show him bare-chested with turbans and swords, or standing, devious-eyed, before Islamic carpets. Aside from the sash at Alexandre's waist (perhaps suggesting a Moor's costume), Larsson avoids this kind of egregious orientalizing. She paints him with palpable freshness and a beautiful touch. Note the glistening oils on his neck lightening his skin where it twists, the nonchalantly captured texture of his hair, and the lines on his cheek where they meet his stubble.
Larsson stopped painting when she married and started a family. She had met her husband, the Swedish designer and artist Carl Larsson, in 1882, at an artists' colony in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, near Paris. They had their first child in France before returning to Sweden, and when he asked her to end her painting career, she complied.
She bore eight children in total (one died in infancy). Somehow, amid all the domestic labor, she found time to transform herself from a (clearly brilliant) painter into an innovative weaver, embroiderer and clothing designer, to collaborate with Larsson, and to pose for his paintings — just as Alexandre posed for her.